Counter-hegemonic contra-flow and the Al Jazeera America fiasco: A social network analysis of Al Jazeera America’s Twitter users

Abstract

Al Jazeera America, arguably the most ambitious attempt in history by a non-Western network to broadcast to US audiences, was shut in April 2016. A social network analysis of Al Jazeera America’s following on Twitter reveals that 42 per cent of Al Jazeera America’s followers did not follow any other US news outlet and that most of the remaining 58 per cent followed liberal stations. The findings illustrate mainstream US news consumers’ reluctance to follow Al Jazeera America, which only appealed to specific audiences. The analysis portrays the challenges facing counter-hegemonic contra-flow stations such as Al Jazeera America in their bid to gain legitimacy in the West, and specifically in the United States, and highlights the relevance of selective exposure and hostile media theories in the case of counter-flowing stations.

Keywords

Al Jazeera contra-flow hostile media Qatar selective exposure

When the microstate of Qatar launched an ambitious local US-based television station aiming directly at US audiences, countering the traditional US-to-periphery information flow, Al Jazeera America (AJAM) became possibly the boldest attempt to challenge US media hegemony within the United States itself (Sakr, 2007; Samuel-Azran, 2008). Initial figures, however, indicated that the AJAM television channel did not gain the success initially hoped for it in the television realm (Winsor, 2014), and the station announced its closure in early 2016. To better understand the reasons behind AJAM’s failure, this study examines the reception of AJAM in the online realm. The idea for the study was born in 2015, before the news of AJAM’s closure, and thus analysis of the demographics and nature of AJAM’s online following can shed light on reasons for its closure. In our analysis, we examined AJAM’s online following via a social analysis of AJAM’s followers on Twitter. Twitter is a highly relevant platform for analysis of AJAM’s reception in the United States as the Pew Research Center reported that 23 per cent of all Internet users, equivalent to 20 per cent of the US adult population, have largely replaced their traditional news consumption with Twitter (Duggan, 2015). Consequently, a social network analysis (SNA) of AJAM’s following on Twitter may illuminate aspects of its operations that other analyses, such as Nielsen ratings, cannot.

Our assumption, which is based on recent studies of the followers of the AJAM television channel, is that most of AJAM’s followers on Twitter are US based, as AJAM focused on domestic US affairs (e.g. Xie and Boyd-Barrett, 2015). Twitter was also selected as the platform for the study (rather than other social networks such as Facebook) as AJAM maintains an active Twitter account, and Twitter allows access to relevant information regarding AJAM followers, including their other news-following habits, the number of re-tweets of AJAM’s material, and other useful data that other social networks do not make public. In addition, in 2014, AJAM won a Shorty Award (an annual US-based award that recognizes people and organizations that produce outstanding real-time short-form content across social media) for ‘Best News Twitter Account’, acknowledging the high quality of AJAM’s Twitter feeds.

The study, conducted on 21 March 2015, before the news of AJAM’s closure became public, examines the profiles of the 290,102 followers of AJAM on that day on Twitter, as indicated by Twitter’s statistics. The analysis begins by examining how many Al Jazeera followers follow no other news outlet, as against those who follow other US news outlets as well, which indicates a desire to learn about US affairs from various sources. Next, the study examines which news outlets AJAM Twitter followers choose to follow, specifically whether these are liberal or conservative sources, based on a popular classification of liberal and conservative sources in the United States by Groseclose and Milyo (2005). This information should illuminate the political orientation of AJAM Twitter followers, which is an important factor in understanding the profile of AJAM Twitter followers and the rigidity of their political affiliations. Next, to understand the resonance of AJAM’s tweets, which is another indication of the influence of AJAM’s materials, we examined the extent to which Al Jazeera followers re-tweet AJAM’s tweets. Finally, we examined the distribution of AJAM’s followers’ re-tweets. Altogether, the study offers the first comprehensive analysis of AJAM’s online impact in the United States, and sheds light on one of the most ambitious attempts to date to counter the US news hegemony with a US station sponsored by a Middle Eastern source (the Qatari Emir).

The theoretical rationale for the study

In the late 1960s, international communication scholars argued that the media flow from the West to the non-West promotes cultural imperialism (Schiller, 1976, 1991, 1993) and media imperialism (Boyd-Barrett, 1977). Schiller (1976) argued that the unilateral flow of information from major US-based transnational networks to non-Western countries erodes the cultural autonomy of these countries, as capitalist consumption values are being injected through advertising and television programmes into non-Western audiences’ ‘hearts and minds’. These arguments were supported empirically by studies of US media’s export of television programmes and advertising influence on various world regions’ local cultures (Mattelart, 1979, 2000).

Other scholars have, in contrast, posited that claims of media imperialism are exaggerated as groups interpret global news events in line with their respective cultures (Clausen, 2004; Straubhaar, 1991). Notably, in their comprehensive empirical content analysis study (based on 2569 news stories), Gurevitch et al. (1991) argued that local networks were ‘domesticating’ the ‘foreign’ news. Furthermore, audience reception studies show that what is defined as ‘national’ plays a central role in the understanding and interpretation of international news. For example, Jensen’s (1998) study of the reception of international news by audiences in seven countries found that interpretation of foreign news is influenced by how these audiences view the position of their own nation in the world.

Another notable line of criticism of the media imperialism argument asserts that the increased export of non-Western content to the West (Boyd-Barrett and Thussu, 1992) creates what both Sinclair et al. (1996) and Thussu (2000) define as a ‘counter-hegemonic contra-flow’, countering the unilateral flow of information from the West to the non-West with significant flows of information in the opposite direction. Defining the phenomenon, Sinclair et al. (1996) argued that ‘countries once thought of as major “clients” of media imperialism, such as Mexico, Canada, and Australia […] have successfully exported their programs and personnel into the metropolis – the empire strikes back’ (p. 23). Major examples of such counter-flows are Bollywood in the film industry, Latin telenovelas in the entertainment TV realm, Japanese anime and manga in the animation realm and, following the 9/11 attacks, the Qatari news station Al Jazeera in the news realm.

Finally, another criticism of cultural imperialism stems from globalization scholars. For Tomlinson (1999), globalization’s ‘bright side’ is that it ‘dissolves the securities of locality’ (p. 30) for both the West and the non-West. Furthermore, a notion that has gained increasing traction within the postmodern paradigm is that the non-Western contra-flow contributes to a global hybrid ‘cultural bricolage’, where non-Western and Western cultural flows fuse. Hannerz (1997) coined the term ‘creative confrontation’ to describe the desired reality of cross-cultural heterogeneity and information exchanges that change and affect both the West and the non-West. In the context of Al Jazeera’s material presence in the West, the potential, of course, is that Al Jazeera reports will contribute to the emergence of a creative confrontation between the Arab perspective and US news consumers.

Indeed, several scholars trace the beginnings of such creative confrontations to the period after the 9/11 attacks, when Western networks were forced to commission news materials from Al Jazeera reporters in Kandahar and Kabul, where US media had no correspondents of their own, throughout the war in Afghanistan. Volkmer (2002) argued that the global spread of Al Jazeera created ‘[…] a new dimension in the global news flow, which not only refines domestic and foreign news in national journalism in times of crisis but also the news angle of transnational networks, such as CNN’ (p. 241). For Volkmer, the export of Al Jazeera’s images to Western stations showed that transnational news networks can ‘[…] enforce political pressure on national politics and provide a communication realm, which would otherwise not be possible on a national level’ (p. 243). Under this new communication environment, national and transnational news media are converging to create a new context that relocates the vertical national viewpoint within national boundaries into a ‘somewhat horizontal global angle’ (Volkmer, 2002: 242). Volkmer’s claims were empirically supported by Jasperson and El-Kikhia’s (2002) research, which found that the availability and use of Al Jazeera’s news material by US networks during the war in Afghanistan in 2001 added a new perspective that was not evident in the coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. More recent studies confirm that Al Jazeera English (AJE) indeed enriched the global news agenda with stories from the global south, thus bringing news from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to the forefront (Figenschou, 2010, 2013). Painter’s (2008) analysis also identified that AJE provides much more coverage on the southern hemisphere in comparison to CNN International (CNNI) and BBC World News, further strengthening the notion regarding its ability to promote a genuine counter-hegemonic contra-flow. Similarly, Bebawi (2016) notes that despite the Western broadcasting style of AJE, its actual broadcasting content promotes Arab perspectives globally. Finally, Samuel-Azran (2008) argued that AJE is the first true counter-hegemonic contra-flow channel in the sense that it sometimes provides videos and materials to Western viewers despite Western administrations’ resistance. In accordance with all these accounts, and in line with Thussu’s (2000) definition of contra-flow, in this article, we consider Al Jazeera as a bearer of counter-hegemonic contra-flow.

It is, however, important to note that the idea that AJE provides counter-hegemonic contra-flows that can impact Western audiences is not without criticism and it actually contradicts two of the most established classic media theories: the theories of selective exposure and hostile media. The nearly 60-year-old selective exposure theory evolved from Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory, which posits that after people commit to an attitude, belief or decision, they tend to gather information that supports it and neglect contradictory information to avoid post-decisional conflict. The theory was initially reinforced in the media context by Katz (1968), and a meta-analysis evaluation (Hart et al., 2009) of dozens of studies on the selective exposure theory confirmed its validity. The theory, by definition, negates the idea that significant counter-hegemonic contra-flow effects can take place in the United States as most US news consumers will not tune in to an Arab-originated channel.

In a similar manner, the idea that AJE ventures will gain popularity and impact in the United States contradicts the hostile media theory, which posits that one’s group identification – whether religious, national or political – is the strongest predictor of one’s perceptions of media credibility and selection of media sources (Gunther, 1992; see also Choi et al., 2006; Eveland and Shah, 2003; Johnson and Kaye, 2004; Salmon, 1986; Sherif and Hovland, 1961). According to the hostile media approach, individuals with high issue-involvement or those belong to a specific group will typically view media coverage of their group or issue as biased against their position or group (Vallone et al., 1985). The hostile media theory adherents, then, would reject any chance that AJAM Twitter accounts would reach a large number of average US news consumers.

Next, to better contextualize the study, the following section examines in greater detail the successes and challenges of Al Jazeera’s English ventures in the United States on the ground.

AJE in the Unites States

Since 9/11, Al Jazeera has become a well-known brand name in the West, and Al Jazeera Arabic’s counter-hegemonic images have repeatedly set the ‘global news agenda’ on the battle-zones in Afghanistan (Jasperson and El-Kikhia, 2002) and Iraq (Samuel-Azran, 2010). In line with the success of Al Jazeera Arabic in the West, the network launched several English language outlets aiming at both Arabs living in the West and at non-Arab English-speaking audiences. The first was an English website (English.aljazeera.net), launched on 1 September 2002. The launch of this English-language online news service represented an unprecedented attempt by a foreign network to directly target a Western audience with broadcasts from ‘behind enemy lines’, and potentially influence public opinion through reports that frequently contradict the local mainstream news media. A study that tracked the resonance of AJE’s articles, however, found that the English sites that represented materials from Aljazeera.net were alternative left-wing websites, concluding that they had limited impact on US public discourse (Samuel-Azran, 2008).

Next, on 15 November 2006, Al Jazeera launched a 24/7 English television channel named AJE. The channel aimed to ‘emphasize news from the developing world, without an Anglo-American worldview’ (https://english.aljazeera.net). Its stated objective was to ‘reverse the [North to South] flow of information’. The channel’s executives also declared that its aim was to compete with CNN and BBC World and offer a global perspective to a potential world audience of over 1 billion English speakers. While AJE was able to gain access to many European countries, Republican bodies nonetheless successfully blocked its distribution in the United States and, accordingly, most American cable providers refused to carry the channel (Samuel-Azran, 2010). Before its launch, the channel was reportedly on the verge of signing a distribution contract with Comcast, the largest cable provider in the United States, to carry the channel on the Detroit cable system, but Comcast backed out of the negotiations several days before AJE’s launch and announced that it would not carry Al Jazeera. Comcast’s decision was a major blow for Al Jazeera for two reasons: first, it meant that no major body would distribute its broadcasts on its launch day. Second, Comcast is a leading cable carrier in the United States, which set a precedent against carrying Al Jazeera in other strategic regions. After the Comcast announcement, Nigel Parsons, the founding managing director of AJE, stated his belief that the decision was based on political pressure rather than ‘lack of bandwidth’, as Comcast argued (Samuel-Azran, 2010). Over subsequent months, AJE’s negotiations with the other major cable carriers – Cox Communications and Time Warner – also failed. Only two small cable carriers agreed to carry AJE at its launch in November 2006 – Burlington TV (BT) in Vermont and Buckeye in Toledo, Ohio. Even then, intense pressure from the public as well as from lobbyist groups, particularly the conservative group Accuracy in Media, was placed on these two small cable carriers to stop offering AJE. Accuracy in Media, a media watchdog founded in 1969 that systematically criticizes ‘leftist propaganda’ in the media, ran a campaign urging Americans to take action against AJE by writing, calling or emailing their Senators and House representatives. In Vermont, a group called Defenders Council of Vermont was formed in 2007 following Al Jazeera’s arrival in Burlington Vermont to persuade the city municipality that Al Jazeera broadcasts propaganda by Islamic Jihadists (Youmans, 2011).

To overcome such resistance, AJE hired a high-profile Manhattan-based public relations (PR) agency to promote its status and brand name. Brown Lloyd James was hired to monitor anti-AJE messages on television, newspapers and the web 24/7 and to respond instantly to any negative commentary about the channel. Additionally, Al Jazeera’s PR agency launched an ‘I want AJE’ campaign, which included a website dedicated to defying ‘myths’ about the Al Jazeera brand. It presented Al Jazeera as a network that adheres to a strict code of ethics, emphasized that its broadcasts do not show beheadings, and that even Israelis consume some of their news from Al Jazeera despite its ‘Arab’ source. They further stressed the last point, highlighting that Al Jazeera conducted more interviews with Israeli officials than did CNN or BBC. These efforts were meant to promote the AJE channel’s ultimate goal: to encourage Americans to proactively support the distribution of AJE by writing to their local cable and satellite providers and asking them to carry the channel. When AJE’s attempts to gain US television viewers mostly failed, the efforts moved to target online readership. Considering the initial clashes with cable distributors in the United States, promoting the AJE website proved an effective method of reaching the US audience without reliance on third parties. As a result, in the first few years after its launch, AJE was exposed to US viewers mainly via its website, which maintained a small but loyal US audience, mainly from the left and extreme left-wing of the political map, as well as Muslim immigrants (Samuel-Azran, 2008, 2010).

AJAM

After its unsuccessful attempt to gain a wide viewership for the AJE television channel in the United States, the Al Jazeera media network sought a new approach. On 2 January 2013, Al Jazeera purchased Current TV from Al Gore for US$500 million (Bauder, 2014) and immediately closed the Current TV station. According to Los Angeles Times writer Joe Flint (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-st-alJazeera-america-20130815-story.html), the purchase of Current TV represented AJAM’s attempt to gain access to over 50 million viewers over the heads of the cable satellite providers who originally refused to distribute it.

Al Jazeera announced its intention to reorganize its overall English-language broadcast structure, having AJE broadcast globally while launching AJAM exclusively for the US audience, providing both domestic and international news to local US viewers. The AJAM channel was launched on 20 August 2013. AJAM has headquarters in New York City, employs a team of close to 800 journalists and staff, and has also opened 3 broadcast centres and 12 bureaus in major US cities, making AJAM the news organization with the largest newsgathering capabilities in the United States. With this step, AJAM focused its efforts on challenging the major US news networks, such as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and becoming part of the American news landscape.

While inheriting Current TV’s existing distribution deals, not all distributors agreed to carry the AJAM channel following this acquisition. Time Warner Cable, the largest pay-TV provider in Los Angeles, chose to drop the channel when it learned of Current TV’s sale to the Al Jazeera brand (Fung and Mirkinson, 2013). On the night before AJAM’s launch, U-Verse, the AT&T brand of telecommunications services in 22 states of the United States, also decided not to air the channel, reducing the launch’s reach by around 5 million U-Verse customers. In the end, AJAM premiered in about 45 million homes (Samuel-Azran, 2016). The Al Jazeera network filed a lawsuit against AT&T and Time Warner and, on 27 June 2014, AT&T and U-Verse added AJAM to its offering as part of a settlement. Similarly, on 24 October 2013, Time Warner Cable and AJAM announced that they had reached an agreement and were bringing AJAM to Time Warner Cable. The deals brought AJAM broadcasts to New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and other major markets, causing a substantial increase in viewership reach, raising the total number of homes in the United States with access to the channel to 55 million.

Although AJAM has been broadcasting exclusive American content from 12 bureaus across the United States with rich content since its inception, it only managed to attract 17,000 viewers on average during primetime in its first year of operation. The viewership for the channel began growing only in late 2014, once AJAM began reporting about Gaza, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the race-related events in Ferguson, Missouri, where a Black, unarmed 18-year-old was killed by a White police officer. Although viewership rose by 50 per cent in 2014, AJAM’s primetime viewership average was still less than 5 per cent of CNN’s, which had 600,000 viewers in comparison to AJAM’s 25,000 (Winsor, 2014). In light of its modest number of viewers, one year after its launch, AJAM cut back on expenses and laid off 60–100 staff members, leading some to wonder whether the money backers in Qatar’s administration had stopped their generous backing (Atkinson, 2013).

Despite these failures, AJAM has achieved impressive success in the content department, and has managed to win two Peabody awards for its flagship investigative show, Fault Lines, as well as Peabody awards for documentaries on cholera in Haiti and a deadly factory fire in Bangladesh. The Huffington Post recognized AJAM for its unique contributions to the news market, noting ‘that its reporting from the Middle East during and after the Arab Spring gave it a vastly increased credibility inside the US’ (Fung and Mirkinson, 2013).

Explanations vary for AJE and AJAM’s marketing failure in the US television realm despite their extensive investments and award-winning content, yet one important study illuminates several points that deserve consideration. Youmans and Brown (2011) studied the reception of Al Jazeera in American society during AJE’s ‘greatest moment’ in the United States, when the station was praised for its bold and professional coverage of the Arab Spring, which raised the number of its US viewers exponentially. In their study, 177 US participants representing a sample of the US population were randomly divided into three groups: those who viewed an AJE clip, those who viewed a CNNI clip and a control group.

Participants in the AJE and CNNI conditions viewed a news story that originally aired on AJE about the Taliban and its position on peace talks with the government in Kabul. As part of the study, identifying AJE markings were removed and replaced with CNNI branding and vice versa for the CNNI material. Those in the control condition did not watch a video. Participants were then asked to indicate how biased and trustworthy they would rate AJE and CNNI, and to note their intention to watch AJE and CNN. The findings of the study clearly showed that even during the so-called ‘AJE moment’, substantial prejudice against AJE persisted among the US public, as the average respondent gave more credit to CNNI for an AJE-produced news clip edited to look like a CNNI clip, but no similar credit was given to AJE when the CNNI-produced clip carried AJE’s logo. The study concluded that bias against Al Jazeera in the United States is rooted in religious and cultural differences.

While AJE’s reception in the United States has already been studied in the television and online realm (Samuel-Azran, 2008, 2010; Youmans and Brown, 2011), AJAM is a new channel for which few empirical evaluations have been made, specifically in the online realm. This is a lacuna that this study aims to address with a specific focus on Twitter, a leading social media platform. Three key features distinguish social media from the television and online realm. First, social media allow users not only consume but also produce information, whereas the supply of information in traditional media markets is typically concentrated in the hands of a small number of decision-makers. Second, the information to which users are exposed depends upon users’ self-selected sources. That is, users may be exposed to significantly different information depending on the individuals with whom they are connected and the content created by these individuals. Third, information on social media travels more rapidly and is disseminated more widely than in other forms of social interactions. For example, a tweet from a user on Twitter is simultaneously transmitted to all that user’s followers, and each time one of these followers re-tweets this tweet, another set of followers is exposed to the information.

Given these differences between social media and other forms of communication and its growing role, we were motivated to examine AJAM’s reception within Twitter. Thus, the first research question this study wishes to examine is:

RQ1: What is the political orientation of AJAM’s Twitter followers?

Furthermore, given recent findings indicating that following a given Twitter account is not a sufficient indication of actually being interested in the content posted on that account (Bruns and Stieglitz, 2013), we further examined the proportion of users who re-tweeted content posted by AJAM as an indication of the number of users who are actively engaging with the content posted by AJAM:

RQ2: What are the re-tweeting patterns of the followers of AJAM?

To study these research questions, we developed a simple model of data collection and user media exposure within Twitter. We use the model to examine the share of AJAM followers who consume content from other sources, and whether these other sources contain similar ideological inclinations (liberal). That is, we seek to illuminate whether AJAM Twitter users are mostly exposed to information from Twitter news outlets that reinforce their existing views, or also from sources from the other (conservative) end of the political spectrum, indicating openness to diverse political views.

Methodology

SNA focuses on the structure of relationships among units, whether individuals, groups or organizations, and on the way these relationships affect processes in a network (Hayat and Mo, 2015). The links in a social network depict various kinds of relationships including collaboration, kinship, shared ideologies, economic exchange and communication. The basic premises underlying SNA are as follows: (1) nodes and their actions are interdependent of their relational structure and nodes are not viewed as independent autonomous units; (2) links between nodes are channels for transfer or flow of resources (material or non-material); (3) the network structure is an environment that provides incentives, opportunities or constraints on individual action; and (4) network models conceptualize structure as a lasting pattern of links between individual nodes. This structure persists as a relationship beyond the time at which it formed (Wasserman and Faust, 1994).

This article focuses on social networks that represent followers’ ties on Twitter. Using a network approach, these interactions can be described using the following scheme: individuals are represented as nodes in the network; nodes are connected to one another by an edge if a relationship between them exists. Thus, the use of SNA in online media consumption research can be a valuable resource for understanding the diversity of media sources individuals turn to. We find SNA to be particularly useful in analysing AJAM’s following as it can shed light on its hidden patterns of consumption.

Data

Our study uses data from Twitter, an Internet platform through which users connect and communicate with each other. We describe below the data we collected. Our goal is to construct a network of AJAM followers. As we also sought to identify the other news sources to which these followers are exposed, we tracked all the news outlets that AJAM’s followers follow on Twitter. As noted, on 21 March 2015, the day our data were collected and downloaded, 290,102 Twitter users followed AJAM. These users comprise our sample of Twitter users.

The data were collected using a dedicated scraping tool written by the authors specifically for this project, designed to query the Twitter’s Streaming Application Programming Interface (API); no other third party tools were used for the data collection process. An API is a set of instructions and protocols that allow users to access a web-based software application. Twitter’s streaming API (https://dev.twitter.com/) offers access to new public Twitter messages and their associated metadata, such as the user who posted them, date, location, language and so forth (Rossi and Giglietto, 2016), as soon as the data are available. Notably, there is no guarantee that the API captures all tweets that match the tracking criteria: temporary interruptions may cause gaps in transmission that even a secondary check through the search API cannot fill. Thus, in line with previous work on Twitter API data collection (e.g. Bruns and Stieglitz, 2013), we introduce a small margin of error in our captured data and treat the resulting datasets as close approximations rather than as completely exhaustive representations of the entire body of all AJAM followers.

Given that the dataset is restricted to Twitter users who follow the Twitter accounts of AJAM, a natural critique of our data is that our sample may not be representative of either (1) viewers of TV shows at large or (2) Twitter users and social media users at large. On the first point, it is well established that social media users are younger, more highly educated, more likely to be non-White and more likely to use mobile devices than the general population (Zickuhr and Madden, 2012). While we concede that our sample is not representative of the population of TV viewers at large, it is important to emphasize that social media is an important sector to study in and of itself. Moreover, a focus on social media allows us to compare our results to other groups of TV viewers.

Results

We explored the media outlets followed by the users in our sample. We used 19 of the 20 outlets proposed by Groseclose and Milyo (2005). We eliminated the ‘The Early Show’, which was no longer running at the time of our study. Groseclose and Milyo (2005) computed an ideology score for these 20 media outlets by counting the times that a particular media outlet cites various think-tanks and policy groups, and by comparing this number with the times that members of Congress cite the same groups. Their ideology score ranges from 0 (conservative outlook) to 1 (liberal outlook). We examined the overlap between the number of individuals who follow both AJAM and these media outlets. This procedure was validated in recent studies in the Twitter context (Halberstam and Knight, 2014), and specifically in studies that have looked at AJAM’s Twitter account (Hayat et al., 2016).

As depicted in Figure 1, 167,348 (58%) AJAM followers follow at least one additional news outlet from our list. Table 1 presents the outlets by ascending ideology score. The number of users who follow both AJAM and each outlet appears in the third column.

Figure 1.

Overlap between users who follow AJAM and at least one other media outlet.

Table 1.

Breakdown of Al Jazeera followers who follow at least one other media outlet.

News outlet	Twitter handle	% of Al Jazeera followers who follow this outlet	Number of Al Jazeera followers who follow this outlet
Fox News	FoxNews	0.026	7543
The Drudge Report	DRUDGE_REPORT	0.027	8337
The Washington Times	WashTimes	0.029	8413
The Wall Street Journal	WSJ	0.041	11,894
US News & World Report	USnews	0.049	14,215
The LA Times	LAtimes	0.051	14,795
USA Today	USAtoday	0.051	14,795
Good Morning America	GMA	0.051	14,795
The News Hour	NewsHour	0.052	15,085
CBS News	CBSNews	0.053	15,375
Newsweek	Newsweek	0.054	15,666
The Washington Post	Washingtonpost	0.054	15,666
The Today Show	TODAYShow	0.055	15,956
Time Magazine	TIME	0.057	16,536
ABC World News	ABCWorldNews	0.057	16,536
CNN Breaking News	CNNbrk	0.058	16,826
NBC Nightly News	NBCNightlyNews	0.058	16,826
The New York Times	nytimes	0.06	17,406
Morning Edition (NPR)	MorningEdition	0.066	19,147

Of the 290,102 Al Jazeera followers in our sample, 167,348 (58%) follow at least one other media outlet from the above list.

The distribution of the re-tweets made by the users in our sample (Figure 2) demonstrates a heavy-tailed distribution (Cha et al., 2009) – that is, there is a small number of users who tweeted many tweets, while the majority of the Twitter users tweeted a small number of tweets. The same heavy-tailed distribution was evident when we studied the number of followers of each user in the network (Figure 3): a small number of users had many followers, while the majority of the Twitter users had few followers.

Figure 2.

Re-tweet distribution of Al Jazeera followers.

Figure 3.

Degree centrality of Al Jazeera followers.

Discussion and conclusion

The article examines the nature of AJAM’s following on Twitter using SNA. The analysis is important not only for understanding the impact of AJAM, but for illuminating these effects from a broader perspective, specifically the impact of one of the most ambitious attempts at counter-hegemonic contra-flows ever made in the news realm. The analysis identifies that only 58 per cent of AJAM’s 290,102 followers on 21 March 2015 followed at least one additional network, which indicates that AJAM was, to some degree, an enclave, as no less than 42 per cent of its followers refrained from following any other US new station. Based on past studies that found that Al Jazeera’s news consumers in the United States are mostly Muslim or belong to the radical left of the political map (Johnson and Fahmy, 2008; Samuel-Azran, 2010), it is possible that many of the 42 per cent of AJAM Twitter followers who do not follow any other news outlet fall within these categories, though future studies should address participants’ socio-cultural backgrounds to offer a better assessment of the populations that follow Al Jazeera’s English outlets in the West. Future studies, then, should conduct a deeper examination of the profile of these Twitter followers, and specifically explore the extent to which the demographics of Al Jazeera’s online following comprised Muslim-Americans who feel more comfortable obtaining their news from a network that broadcasts through a prism of their own ‘home culture’. If this was the case, such findings would be consistent with Johnson and Fahmy’s (2008) findings that US citizens with Arab-Muslim origins consider Al Jazeera to be dramatically more credible than local stations.

One possible explanation of our results can be found in the selective exposure theory literature described above (Hart et al., 2009; Jonas et al., 2001), which asserts that users tend to follow networks that reinforce their own existing world-view and refrain from attending to other sources. Thus, the fact that slightly over half of AJAM Twitter followers do not follow other US stations and the remaining half follows mostly liberal sources illustrates the general resistance of general US online news followers to AJAM as a legitimate and desired news source to follow on Twitter. Another possibly related and relevant theory is the hostile media theory (Vallone et al., 1985) mentioned above, which explains that media users often follow only one of a small number of networks because other media are considered hostile. Here, the study strengthens Youmans and Brown’s (2011) findings (described in further detail above), which also reflect basic resistance to follow AJAM, possibly on grounds of cross-cultural tensions, and thus further indicate that counter-hegemonic contra-flows are likely to be mostly rejected by receiving cultures on the grounds that it contradicts and challenges locals’ existing views and beliefs.

Next, we found that most of the users who follow at least one other news station followed liberal networks, and that the least-followed sources were conservative sources such as the Drudge Report and Fox News. In other words, among AJAM followers who follow other stations (58% of our sample), approximately twice as many followers follow liberal rather than conservative sources. This, again, further strengthens the relevance of selective exposure and hostile media theories for our findings.

Finally, we examined the scope of re-tweets and discovered a small number of re-tweets from the Twitter followers of the AJAM network overall, indicating relatively little resonance and activity surrounding AJAM’s tweets.

Taken together, the findings of the present study indicate that AJAM’s Twitter following was small and centred around people that do not follow AJAM to learn about news from another perspective, but to reinforce their existing beliefs; as noted, these were possibly Muslim-Americans and people who hold liberal and far-left views. The study, then, indicates that despite AJAM’s enormous efforts to reach mainstream US audiences, the station largely failed in its task. This adds to statistics about the failure of the AJAM television operation and the general blocking of AJE in the United States for many years, described above. Overall, it is safe to argue, based on all the data, that AJAM’s counter-hegemonic contra-flow attempt did not succeed in its original mission to gain influence in the US market, the most desired market for non-Western networks aiming to reach Western audiences, as also illustrated vividly in Qatar’s decision to shut the channel down in 2016. The study weakens the creative confrontation argument (Hannerz, 1997), which suggests that globalization will include genuine cross-cultural exchanges, as well as Volkmer’s (2002) arguments regarding Al Jazeera’s potential to challenge the local perspective of US audiences. Instead, the findings strengthen the notion that audiences resist and ignore counter-flowing perspectives from networks that represent other cultures and perspectives, as reflected in the findings of Youmans and Brown (2011) that AJE’s material reception in the United States is rooted in religious and cultural biases.

Future studies should examine whether the online following of AJE (as opposed to AJAM) in other Western countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Europe, reflects a more diverse, creative confrontation (Hannerz, 1997). Such studies will offer a wider perspective for further examining the impact of the contemporary counter-hegemonic contra-flows, and specifically its influence on Western public discourse.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Tal Samuel-Azran (PhD, University of Melbourne; MA, New York University) is the head of the international programme at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications. His main fields of research are political communication, new media and media globalization.

Tsahi Hayat (PhD, University of Toronto) is on the faculty at the Sammy Ofer School of communication. Dr Hayat’s research focuses on complex socio-technical systems, networks of people, artifacts, data and ideas. Dr Hayat is particularly interested in how new technologies such as tablets, smartphones and social media platforms may enable or hinder the transfer of different resources within social networks.

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